Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams

London

B. Crosby, Stationers-Court, Ludgate Street

1794

"The slightest breath of dishonour would have stung him to the very soul"

It is difficult to conceive any even more terrible to the individual upon whom it fell, than the treatment which Mr. Falkland in this instance experienced. Every passion of his life was calculated to make him feel it more acutely. He had repeatedly exerted an uncommon energy and prudence, to prevent the misunderstanding between Mr. Tyrrel and himself from proceeding to extremities; but in vain! It was closed with a catastrophe, exceeding all that he had feared, or that the most penetrating foresight could have suggested. To Mr. Falkland disgrace was worse than death. The slightest breath of dishonour would have stung him to the very soul. What must it have been with this complication of ignominy, base, humiliating, and public? Could Mr. Tyrrel have understood the evil he inflicted, even he, under all his circumstances of provocation, could scarcely have perpetrated it. Mr. Falkland's mind was full of uproar like the war of contending elements, and of such suffering as casts contempt on the refinements of inventive cruelty. He wished for annihilation, to lie down in eternal oblivion, in an insensibility, which, compared with what he experienced, was scarcely less enviable than beatitude itself. Horror, detestation, revenge, inexpressible longings to shake off the evil, and a persuasion that in this case all effort was powerless, filled his soul evel to bursting.
(pp. 164-5)

Animals::Insects

Reading

5 entries in ESTC (1794, 1795, 1796, 1797).

William Godwin, Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, 3 vols. (London: B. Crosby, Stationers-Court, Ludgate Street, 1794). <Link to ESTC>

Reading Caleb Williams, ed. Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley. (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000).

05/09/2005